


Growing Pains

by sahiya



Series: Amelia Pond Has Two Immortal Daddies [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Parenthood, wee!Amelia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-26
Updated: 2011-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:30:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes growing up ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing Pains

**Author's Note:**

> This was another Bingo line for the [wintercompanion](http://wintercompanion.livejournal.com) fest; prompts are listed at the start of each ficlet. They take place in the [Amelia Pond Has Two Immortal Daddies](http://archiveofourown.org/series/7065) ‘verse of “The Rest of the Story” and “Eddies and Streams.” Thanks to fuzzyboo03 for the lightning fast beta.

**Chills**

Amelia leaned against Jack, shivering despite the blankets piled on her bed. He pressed his lips to her forehead and winced; she was running one hell of a fever. He wished the Doctor would hurry up. He was synthesizing an antiviral in the medlab, and while Jack wasn’t worried, per se, Amelia was clearly very uncomfortable with whatever she’d picked up on one of their recent jaunts. At least she’d stopped throwing up.

“Cold,” she muttered, inching closer.

Jack squeezed her tighter. “I know, sweetheart. You want a story?”

“No.” She swallowed. “The Doctor isn’t mad at me, is he? I didn’t mean to puke on his shoes, I couldn’t help it.”

“He’s not mad,” Jack assured her. “He’s just making up some medicine for you. It might take him a little while.” Amelia didn’t look convinced, but it seemed she didn’t have the energy to argue. “Are you sure you don’t want a story? How about 1941?”

“Okay,” Amelia said, as Jack had been almost certain she would. Jack drew a deep breath and began retelling - for perhaps the hundredth time - the story of how he had met the Doctor, once upon a very long time.

She was nearly asleep by the time he rescued Rose from the barrage balloon. That was when Jack looked up and realized the Doctor was standing in the doorway, watching them. When he caught his eye, the Doctor smiled and stepped forward to sit on the bed. He had a hypospray in his left hand; with his right, he brushed his knuckles against Amelia’s cheek. “How’re you feeling?”

“Cold,” Amelia said, opening one eye. “M’sorry about your shoes.”

“I’m too cool for shoes,” the Doctor told her. “In fact, I have here one targeted antiviral, designed specifically for one Amelia Pond, and I whipped it up entirely without shoes.” She smiled. The Doctor tapped her on the nose. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m going to inject this in your arm, and then you’re going to go to sleep. When you wake up you’ll be right as rain. Righter, since rain tends to be very wet and boring. Okay?”

She nodded and offered her arm. He injected her with the hypospray, then rested his hand on top of her head, thumb moving back and forth across her forehead. She went very quiet and then very still, leaning against Jack, until all he could feel was her shivering, and then, gradually, that stopped, too, and it was just her breathing, in and out.

They stayed like that, silent, until finally the Doctor looked at Jack. “Coming to bed?” he asked softly.

Jack looked down at the crown of Amelia’s head. “In a bit,” he said. “I want to sit with her for just a little longer.”

 **What attracts the Doctor to Jack?**

Jack was taking his sweet time coming back.

The Doctor supposed it was probably for the best - nerve disruptor was a clean way to die, but still not very pleasant, and he’d got fried by two or three at once. There was a probably a lot of damage for the time vortex to repair. Still, the Doctor wished he’d hurry up; this was always the hardest part, holding Jack’s hand and waiting for that moment where time sort of winked and Jack came back to life. That moment hurt, though it was a pain the Doctor was getting used to.

Also, the Doctor couldn’t yell at him until he came back. And there would definitely be yelling. Bloody dangerous heroics. The Doctor knew he was hardly one to talk, and there’d been a damn good reason for Jack doing what he had, but that didn’t mean the Doctor had to _like_ it.

The door to Jack’s room opened and Amelia entered, tea tray in hand. She set it on the bedside table and then put her arms around the Doctor. He hugged her one-handed and kissed the crown of her head.

“Not back yet,” she said in a low voice.

“No,” the Doctor agreed. “You know how it goes. Sometimes it takes a while.”

She nodded, wordless. So far they’d managed to avoid her seeing Jack die by forcing her to stay in the TARDIS any time they answered a mauve signal or suspected it might be otherwise dangerous outside, but this wasn’t the first time she’d seen Jack dead. The first time, she’d burst into tears. It was the closest the Doctor had ever seen to Amelia Pond having proper hysterics. The second time, she’d kept it under control, but the Doctor had found her later in the rose garden, having a meltdown. This time, she was just quiet.

It couldn’t be good for her, the Doctor thought. But then again, none of this was, in the strictest sense, _good for her_. But she handled it with minimal nightmares, and it wasn’t like the life she’d been living on Earth had been all that good for her either.

“Who was it?” she asked, softly.

The Doctor looked at her. “Who was what?”

“Who’d he save?”

He looked back at Jack. “Ten hostages. And me, probably. He’s given me more gray hair than you have, and that’s not easy.”

She shrugged. “That’s Jack.” She leaned into him. “He told me once you thought you’d ruined him, and he used to think the same thing. But now he thinks you saved him. And if he can save other people . . . he said it all has to be good for something.”

The Doctor swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I guess so,” he said, a bit thickly. Amelia squeezed him, then climbed up on the bed beside Jack and curled up like a cat with her head on his shoulder. The Doctor closed his eyes and waited for time to wink.

 **Day at the beach**

Amelia stormed into the TARDIS, threw her beach towel and her sun hat off to the side, and stomped up the stairs to her room. “Amelia!” the Doctor called after her, but the only reply was her bedroom door slamming. Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

The Doctor did a fair job of stomping himself as he took them into the vortex. Jack waited until he’d finished and had stepped back to glower up at the Time Rotor. “Not your finest parenting hour, Doc,” he said, mildly.

The Doctor sputtered. “Did you see those - those - _cretins_? _Oggling_ her?”

“No,” Jack said. “I saw two perfectly nice humanoid males of roughly her developmental stage looking at her. I also saw her looking back. What I did not see was any reason for you to physically run them off and declare an end to our day at the beach. Which Amelia has been asking for for weeks.”

“They were _ogling_ her,” the Doctor insisted. “Amelia! _Our_ Amelia!”

“They really weren’t, you know,” Jack said quietly. He stepped casually around the console toward the Doctor. “It was completely harmless. And anyway, how old is she now? Linearly, I mean. Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Twelve years, five months, and eighteen days,” the Doctor said, without even having to check the TARDIS chronometer.

Jack nodded and sneaked an arm around him, pulling the Doctor close. “Still our Amelia, then, but not really our little girl anymore.” The Doctor made a noise of reluctant consent. Jack pressed his forehead to the Doctor’s temple. “Doc, you think maybe this is about something else?”

The Doctor twitched, tried to pull away, but Jack held firm. “No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not ready. I’m not.”

“You’ve been a dad before,” Jack said, and it was only because he was looking that he caught the reflexive flinch. “You know you’re never ready.”

“It took Gallifreyan children decades to reach this point. It’s too soon.”

“It always is,” Jack said softly. The Doctor looked at him, eyes bright. Jack leaned their foreheads together. “I love her just as much as you do. But I think we need to start thinking about giving her a shot at a normal life. We have to start preparing ourselves - and her.”

The Doctor was silent for a long time. At last, he nodded. “Not today. When she turns thirteen.” He sighed. “You’ll stay with her, won’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

Jack nodded. “I promised.”

“I’ll lose both of you.”

“Not forever,” Jack told him, “and not completely, unless you insist on it. And also, like you said, not today,” he added. He kissed the Doctor, more for comfort than for anything else, and then hugged him, hard. “Today,” he said, lips brushing the Doctor’s ear, “today, I think you’d better tell Amelia you’re sorry. And then let’s find her another beach.”

 **Jealousy**

Amelia was studying in her room when she heard the TARDIS materialize in the garden. She froze, head down. The back door slammed.

 _Ignore it_ , she told herself. _Don’t get up._

She couldn’t help it. She stood up and went to the window just in time to see Jack appear below on the garden path. He was drying his hands on a tea towel, and Amelia thought, not for the first time, that she didn’t think she’d ever get over how domestic he was here. The TARDIS had sorted out a reason for her absence and set Jack up as her father’s cousin; Aunt Sharon had never batted an eye. They’d bought a house with a garden, where Jack grew tomato plants and Amelia grew sunflowers, and they took turns making the tea and cleaning up afterward.

Jack missed the Doctor. He never said it aloud, but he did. There were days when Amelia felt so guilty for making him stay with her that she thought about telling him she’d be okay if he wanted to leave. But then she thought about day after day in horrible little Leadworth with no one who knew the truth, and she always seemed to end up crying in the shower.

The door of the TARDIS opened and the Doctor stepped out just as Jack reached the end of the path. He let the tea towel fall, pulled the Doctor into his arms, and kissed him. Amelia watched them lean together, forehead to forehead. Then Jack drew back enough for her to get a good look at the Doctor, and Amelia sucked in a breath.

He looked exhausted. Worn thin. He was gripping Jack’s braces and saying something, and Jack was rubbing a thumb over his cheek, soothing. He pulled the Doctor into a tight hug, and then they both looked up at her window. She stepped back but knew it was too late.

She sat on her bed and waited. Sure enough, half a minute later there was a knock at her door. “Yeah,” she said, even though it made her sound like the sullen teenager she really did not want to be.

Jack opened the door. “Hey -”

“Shut up,” Amelia said, refusing to look at him. “I don’t want to hear it. You have exactly as long as it takes me to make fish custard. And if you’re late, Jack, I swear -” She swiped angrily at her eyes. “ _Don’t_ ,” she snapped, when he moved to hug her. “Just _go_.”

He did. She hated him a little for it, but this was the deal: she would stay on Earth until her eighteenth birthday. After that, if she still wanted to travel in the TARDIS, she could. But until then she was grounded. To see what a normal life was like, the Doctor had said. _Fuck you_ , she’d said. It was the only time she’d ever sworn at him.

She sat on the bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, until she heard the last of the TARDIS sounds fade away. Then she dried her face off using the tissues by her bed. Fish custard, she’d told Jack, so she’d best get started. If the Doctor was lucky, she might even let him in to have some.

 **Hands**

Kissing was a bit weird, Amelia decided. Nice, but weird. Sort of wet and warm. The tongue thing was a bit . . . well, it might take some getting used to. And the noses. To be fair, Rory’s nose was quite large, though not as large as she remembered it being from that time her younger self had run into her older self in Venice. And then there were the _hands_ ; between the two of them, it seemed they had about twenty of them, and neither of them knew where to put them, especially all twisted around in the car. Amelia hadn’t even taken her seat belt off. Finally Rory put one hand on the back of Amelia’s neck and grabbed one of her hands with the other; she pushed the fingers of her free hand into his hair, which he seemed to like. It was softer than she’d expected.

When they finally came up for air, Amelia felt flushed, warm all over, like she was blushing, but she didn’t think she was. And there was a little ball of heat in her belly that she’d never felt before. For the first time, the phrase “turned on” actually made sense.

Rory looked like he was feeling it, too. His eyes were huge in the glow from the porchlight. His lower lip glistened, and Amelia thought about biting it next time, just to see what happened. “Wow,” he said.

Amelia couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah,” she said, feeling a little punch drunk. Or was that kiss drunk? They stared at each other, and Amelia was just thinking about kissing him again to try the lip-biting thing, when the porchlight started flicking on and off.

It had to be the Doctor. Jack would’ve never done something that obnoxious - well, that wasn’t true. Jack had done plenty of obnoxious things, and more than his share of embarrassing ones, too. But he would never do _that_. Before she’d gone out that evening, he’d given her a condom and told her that if she and Rory wanted to have sex, they should just come back to the house and use her bedroom, which was both safe and comfortable.

She knew the appropriate response had been mortification, but that’d just seemed stupid to her. Jack was Jack, and if it came down to it, she really didn’t want to lose her virginity in the backseat of Rory’s parents’ Volvo.

She looked back toward the house just in time to see Jack’s silhouette chase the Doctor’s away from the front door. It was too late, though; Rory was looking up at the house like it’d just occurred to him that he actually had more than one overprotective father to contend with. Through the parted drapes, Amelia could see the two of them arguing in the sitting room. “Sorry,” she said, trying to project a reassuring combination of annoyance and amusement. _Nothing to be scared of here._ “Parents. You know.”

“Yeah,” Rory said. “Parents. Um . . .”

“I should go,” Amelia said, with a mental sigh. “But I had a really good time. Call me tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Rory said, breaking into a grin. “Definitely. I will definitely be calling you tomorrow.” He squeezed her hand for emphasis, a warm, firm press of his fingers against hers, before letting her go so she could climb out of the car.

Jack was alone in the sitting room when she came in. “I banished him,” he said, before she could ask. “How was it?” Amelia felt herself turn red. Jack grinned. “That good, eh?”

“He has nice hands,” she mumbled. She could still feel his hand on the back of her neck, feel his palm pressed against hers. It’d trembled a little, but it’d been firm, not sweaty at all.

Jack laughed. “I’ll bet he does.” He stood up and kissed her on the forehead. “Love you, sweetheart,” he said, and went upstairs to the Doctor, turning the light in the kitchen off on his way.

Amelia stared out at the darkened streets of Leadworth and smiled.

 _Fin._


End file.
